It’s curious, whilst taking money out of people’s pockets with government spending cutback, the British Prime Minister has asked the Office for National Statistics to run a UK-wide well-being survey.

Economist Dr Oliver Hartwich from the Centre for Independent Studies says the state of the economy gives you a clearer idea of how happy people are. At the other extreme, death is a good measure — it’s hard to be happy and dead, and life expectancy varies enormously through Britain’s regions.

If Oliver is right that happiness is linked to the state of the economy, then there are clearly a lot of unhappy people in Ireland right now. One of them is Prime Minister Brian Cowen as his country is forced down the road of accepting a bailout package from the EU and IMF.

In this edition of BTalk we talk about the mistakes made by Britain, including high government spending, and Ireland, who should never have joined the Euro.

Could the culmination of all recent events be that some European countries find themselves extracted from the Euro? If they did, how would it fix Ireland’s problems?